[Kde-games-devel] KGame: A few questions

[Inge Wallin]

Hi there,

On June 30th, I sent a patch to kreversi that I thought made perfect sense.  I 
got a number of replies that confused me, and probably my answers to them 
confused the other people. See  
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-games-devel&m=108592221011540&w=2 for the 
details. 

The reason for the confusion was that I had just studied the code within 
kreversi but was not aware of libkdegames in general and in particular the 
KGame, KPlayer and associated classes.  My patch made sense within kreversi, 
but not in the bigger picture of KDEgames.

Oh, well...  Since then I have studied up on KGame & Co, mainly by using 
Martin Henis excellent documentation pages. I have also waited for the 
release of KDE 3.3 before starting to work (not to mention having had a nice 
vacation :-) ), but now I feel it is time go get going again so that I can 
have something to deliver as soon as KDE 3.3 is released.

Anyway, I want to make Kreversi use KGame and I have a number of questions.
My focus in this is board games, so maybe some of the questions don't make 
sense in a canvas based game. Feel free to expand your answers to fit in with 
all type of games.

1. How up-to-date is Martin Henis docs?  Is there anything that has changed 
that makes the documentation out of date or even wrong?

2. There are two distinct meanings of the word "game": 
a) an abstract entity that contains a number of rules, description of pieces, 
description of the board, etc. (like "the game of chess") and 
b) a game being played by a number of players at a certain time and place 
(like "the game between Kasparov and Karpov at <date> in Helsinki").

My language, Swedish, has two distinct words for the two, and in my previous 
game programs I have made distinct classes for the two usages.  KGame, 
however, seems to try to combine the two.  Is this intentional?  It would be 
interesting to see some comments about this, since the usage of KGame seems 
to be a bit confusing at times.  (Maybe this is just me that isn't used to it 
yet.)

3. Sometimes a game (in the sense b) above) can have viewers that should be 
able to comment to each other about the game. Should this be implemented as 
KPlayers, and, if so, what would be the best way to do it? The players in the 
game shouldn't be able to see the comments, at least not until the game is 
over.

4. If I want to analyze a game (in the b) sense), I might want to look at 
variations, and then save them.  This doesn't seem to be supported by KGame.

5. What game file formats are supported?  There is a very general file format 
for board games that is called SGF, the Smart Game Format.  It would be good 
if libkdegames got support for it.  I am willing to provide the 
implementation.

6. A case that makes the problem in question 2 above evident is this: If I 
want to make a program that can act as a tournament director for a tournament 
with network-based players, I will run into some problems. I think it is 
obvious that it would be a good idea to separate the two meanings but others 
might not think so.  My question is: What are the general views on 
refactoring / changing the API of KGame et al? Are the classes "done", or is 
this work in progress?

Regards,
Inge Wallin